


when all the world dissolves

by scarlett_the_seachild



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Anxiety about Death, Canon Era, Demon Summoning, Guilt, Heaven & Hell, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Necromancy, Nihilism, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Religion, Self-Hatred, alexander is a conjuror, black magic, damnation references, if this kind of angsty religious stuff distresses you then this is maybe not for you, occultism, there is a lot of potentially triggering content in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 15:57:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17984180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlett_the_seachild/pseuds/scarlett_the_seachild
Summary: Alexander conjures spirits.As if things weren't already complicated enough.





	when all the world dissolves

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote an essay on demons and summoning, what else was i supposed to do after that.
> 
> as stated in the tags, this is very angsty and religion heavy full of period-typical associations of hell and sin and damnation and whatnot. please read at your own discretion if you think this might upset you.

“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.  
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God  
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,  
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells  
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?” – Mephistopheles, _Doctor Faustus_

“There is nothing serious in mortality” – _Macbeth_

 

John walks into the room where Alexander is studying one day and slams a book down on the desk in front of him.

“Care to explain this?” he asks.

Alexander looks up from his writing, shocked and reproachful. “Don’t go through my stuff.”

As innocent as they are – I was looking for _Consolations_ , you’re the one who keeps hoarding philosophy –  the excuses don’t come. Instead, John stares at Alexander the way he would a stranger who’d just gutted a dog before his eyes.

Alexander puts down his pen, smoothing the book’s cracked surface with his palm. “I killed my father for it,” he tells John. “Took it from his warm corpse. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“Get rid of it,” Laurens orders him. “Burn it. You’re lucky I found it before anyone else.”

Alexander leans back in his chair, raising an appraising eyebrow. “Or what?” he challenges. “You’ll go to Washington?”

“I should,” says Laurens. There’s less certainty in the statement than justifies speaking it.

Alexander scoffs. “Ok man,” he returns to his letter. “Maybe they’ll hang us next to each other.”

Herein the problem with taking a lover in the army – threats to go to authority are taken entirely unseriously. John doesn’t truly believe Hamilton would spill the beans on their escapades if he really were to condemn him. But nor does he entirely doubt his “if I go down, I’m taking you down with me” attitude to be more than a complete charade. One of the reasons Alexander was willing to get into this was the safety net of mutually assured destruction. Most of the time, he means what he says.

The tome lies spiteful and malignant on the desk. John watches it with real caution, as if at any moment it might leap up and call him names.

Finally, Hamilton gets annoyed.

“Jesus Laurens,” he snaps, getting to his feet and tucking the book under his arm. “If you want to go to Washington, go. Only for God’s sake, don’t _hover.”_

“Obviously I’m not going to Washington,” John snarls. “I want an explanation. I want to know what you’re doing with that.”

 “You want a lot of things, don’t you?” Alexander says cattily. He spreads the book between his palms. “It’s pretty self-explanatory.”

The pages fall open and instinctively, Laurens starts back. His hand flies up to finger the cross around his neck. “It’s evil,” he tells Alexander.

Alexander quirks an eyebrow at him. “So are we,” he says.

So that’s how John finds out. One moment you’re rifling through your best friend’s dirty laundry looking for Seneca, the next you discover said best friend’s a secret Satanist. Hamilton scoffs at the term, tells him God and the Devil became one when they beheaded Charles I but regardless of philosophy, Laurens’ good Christian upbringing isn’t buying. He avoids him for a few days, considers asking for transfer. Even prays for the first time in six years. It doesn’t do any good. Eventually, and as always where Alexander is concerned, his curiosity gets the better of him.

Once John knows, the secrecy is dropped. Alexander takes to staying up late into the night, flicking through the book’s pages with insatiable relish. He copies notes into his commonplace with the same look on his face as when he studies Plutarch and Xenophon. Urgent, intent. It scares John, maybe even more than the book itself, which he tells himself is a fake anyway. It’s old – late sixteenth century, or early seventeenth.  Alexander assures him it _wasn’t_ his father’s, that it was in fact given to him by a preacher friend in St Croix. It belonged to another Scottish laird, who fled to England during King James’ witch trials. He promises John there’s no blood connection. John doesn’t know he believes him.

Initially, he’d refused to be in the same room with it. But then he got bored, and curious again, though he still keeps his distance. There’s a strange fascination, he won’t deny that. It pulls at him even now, sitting on Hamilton’s pallet in the far side of the tent. He thinks he can feel the evil radiating from it, drawing him in.

“Maybe they knew Shakespeare,” Alexander muses, running a finger along the embossed monogram.

“More likely Marlowe,” says John.

Alexander throws him an irritated look. “Are you going to keep being a bitch about this?”

John raises his palms, mutters _Sorry, sorry._

“Does it even work?” he says once the question has gnawed at his insides long enough to make the silence itch.

“As a reading device, it fulfils its function.”

“I mean have you…you know,” Laurens swallows. Pushes past it. “Have you _tried_ it?”

Alexander sighs, laying his pen down briefly to measure his response. “Don’t ask things you don’t want to know the answer to.”

“I do want to know the answer.”

“What, so you can threaten me with hanging again?”

“I would never do that to you,” John protests, stung. “You know I wouldn’t.”

Hamilton makes a noise which suggests that he doesn’t know, actually, not for sure. John tries not to take it personally. It transpired very quickly during their acquaintance that Alexander doesn’t trust anybody. Up till now, telling John that he’s a bastard had been the most he’d ever made himself vulnerable to another individual. And they haven’t known each other all that long.

At last, Alexander turns around in his chair. “It works.”

A cold thing slithers up John’s insides. Alexander is watching him levelly, eyes narrowed for his reaction. It’s a testing look, and John knows that for their friendship to survive, he needs to pass. He swallows again, forces himself to ask the necessary. “What happened?”

“Which time?”  

“You’ve tried it more than _once?”_

Alexander nods slowly. “The first time just after my mother died,” he says. “I wanted to see her again.”

“And…did you?”

Alexander makes an odd movement between a nod and a shrug. “She appeared like she was made out of smoke,” he replied. “Blurred around the edges, more like a memory made real. She told me my breeches needed pressing,” his lip twitches at the memory. “I was so terrified I slammed it shut, and she disappeared. She hasn’t been back since.”

John’s mouth is dry. “Jesus,” he breathes.

Alexander nods. “I’ll never know if it was really her,” he says. “That’s one of the problems. You never know who you’re really speaking to. If it’s who you asked for, or not.”

“What…so you’re saying it could have been…”

“A demon, yes,” Alexander smiles wryly when it’s clear John can’t say the word. “It hasn’t stopped me from trying again, with varying results. I spoke to Lady Jane Grey the other day. Or at least, that’s who she said she was.”

Laurens puts his head in his hands. “How can you talk about this calmly.”

Alexander shrugs. “It’s a small thing to talk to the dead, John,” he says. “If you think about it, we do it all the time.”

“But this is _more than that._ You’re…you’re bringing people _back.”_

“Trust me, I’m not,” says Alexander, tapping the book. “If I could do that, I wouldn’t need this anymore.”

John stares at him, at a loss for words.

Alexander returns to his note-taking. For a while there’s nothing but the scratch of his quill, the stuttering of the candle, and John’s thoughts ricocheting off the walls of his skull.

At last, John breaks the silence. “You said one of the problems,” he ventures. “What are the others?”

“They’re theoretical,” replies Hamilton, casually loading his pen with ink. “Don’t worry about them.”

John understands this to mean Hell.

 

Alexander is not an exhibitionist, he keeps his secrets to himself. He knows that John is horrified, repulsed, and he doesn’t want to drive him any further to the precipice of breakdown than he is already. He doesn’t mention what he genteelly refers to as a “hobby” unless Laurens brings it up. Why would he? Any whiff of his nocturnal activities is enough to have him hanged without trial. The shame and fear caused by a superior officer’s dabbling in black magic would be too much to embarrass a court martial. Especially once it transpired the offender was a Creole, and a sodomite to boot. Even in these enlightened times, he’d be lucky if he escaped the stake.

But John Laurens cannot let things lie – particularly the things which cause him personal crisis. It’s one reason for how they got to the position they’re in.

“That’s a lot of candles,” John observes when Alexander comes into the study with his arms full.

“Uh, yeah,” Alexander concedes without elaboration.

As always, John reads the silence. “Are you trying again?”

Alexander nods. “Moon’s full, so. The aesthetic’s on point.”

John closes his book _(Consolations,_ he found it in one of Lafayette’s shirts) and tries to keep his voice from shaking. “What are you gonna do?”

“Conjure a spirit.”

“Can I watch?”

Alexander starts, blinking at Laurens in surprise. His eyes are wide, expression frank. It’s the same look he had when he first asked if he could suck Hamilton off.

“If you want,” says Alexander, which is what he said then as well. He hesitates. “Are you sure?”

Laurens nods. There’s a determined steel in the set of his jaw. Alexander tells him to meet him in the woods behind camp and goes off to make the rest of his preparations.

Half an hour later they’re standing beneath the dark canopy, the only light bobbing from the candles lit around the pentagram Alexander has drawn in the dirt and the silvery moon tipping onto his back. Alexander is kneeling in the centre, the book wide open in front of him. He’s frowning at it intensely, trying to make out the strange words in the dim lighting. John is standing a good few feet back. He digs his nails into the palms of his hands, trying to calm his breathing and the blood galloping beneath his skin. Somehow, the ritual of it is more terrifying than anything else he’s heard up till now. The scene before him is like something out of a ghost story – the candles, the full moon, the shape in the dirt. Alexander’s poised elfin face, solemn with intent, half cloaked in shadow.

Alexander finds the page he’s looking for. He nods once, says “Okay. Ready” and turns to look at John over his shoulder. “Do you mind taking off your cross?”

John _does_ mind, minds quite a lot. But he unhooks the clasp anyway. “I thought you said you didn’t think they came from Heaven or Hell.”

“I don’t,” Alexander returns. “Still. Don’t wanna offend.”

John stuffs the chain into his pocket, feeling as he does so a lurch of guilty fear. Alexander returns to the book and begins to chant. It sounds like Latin, only it clearly isn’t. It isn’t a real language at all as far as Laurens can make out. The longer it goes on for, the more it sounds like complete gibberish. Laurens is about to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense when suddenly, the air around him draws cold. He flounders, trying to detect the direction of the wind from the trees only they aren’t moving. Everything is terribly, horribly still – the only movement Alexander, still chanting only louder now, and the deafening throb of John’s pulse in his wrist.

When the figure appears, he almost screams.

“Summoner,” the voice is awful – a deafening whisper, echoing like the clang of a bell. It has the figure of a human, only silvery and blurred, insubstantial like mist above water. “What is thy name?”

“My name is Alexander Hamilton,” says Alexander. “What’s yours, spirit?”

“My name is Alexander Hamilton,” the spirit echoes.

A flicker of irritation darts in Hamilton’s jaw. “Fine,” he breathes out sharply. “Don’t tell me. Are you an angel? Or a demon?”

The spirit doesn’t answer. John interprets this as a bad sign. Alexander, however, looks reassuringly at him. “It’s ok, sometimes they don’t know,” he tells John before turning back. “Are you friend or enemy?”

“Friend.”

“Do you know who Alexander Hamilton is?”

“Lieutenant Colonel of the Continental Army.”

“Who heads the Continental Army?”

“George Washington.”

“Who’s the king of England?”

“King George III.”

It goes on like this. Alexander asking question after question, like he’s establishing credentials. At last, apparently satisfied that the article is genuine, he changes theme and the inquiry takes on a different tone.

“Who is General Howe?”

“Commander-in-Chief of the British Army.”

“Where is General Howe?”

“Albany.”

“How long will he remain there?”

“A further two weeks.”

“Does he intend to take Philadelphia?”

“He does.”

“Will he continue on to Philadelphia and support Burgoyne’s troops if Washington goes north?”

“If Washington goes north, General Howe will follow him.”

The conversation continues, Hamilton amassing more and more information about the British movements while John looks on with horror. Finally, he runs out of questions. He thanks the spirt who promptly disappears, and closes the book with satisfaction, blowing out the candles before getting to his feet.

“I hope you got all that down,” he says to John.

“What the fuck,” John is breathing hard. “What the actual-”

“Breathe.”

 _“This_ is how you’ve been getting your intelligence?” John ignores him, voice crawling higher in volume. “This is what you’ve been feeding Washington…my God, the march to Hillsborough…this is how you knew they’d moved without the river-crossing equipment, that they just wanted to draw us into the plain… _this_ was your source?”

Alexander bends close to the ground, packing up his candles. “They should have made me head of the spy ring,” he says. “It would have made disguise so much easier.”

“You’re taking information from a potential demon,” John says out loud just so he can hear it outside his own head. “How… _how_ can you know this is accurate? If it’s safe? What if they’re working for the other side.”

Alexander shrugs. “They haven’t been wrong yet,” he replies. “And in theory, they have my soul in exchange. The least they can do is tell me the truth.”

“Alexander,” John pleads with him. “You’ve got to stop. You have got to end this, now. Before it goes too far.”

Alexander frowns at him as he straightens up, brow working in confusion. “Why?” he demands. “I’m going to win this war for us.”

“We can’t win this way,” John persists. “It’s not…it isn’t honourable.”

Alexander’s releases a short laugh, like a bark. It sends shivers up John’s spine. “Honourable,” he repeats, working his mouth around a bad taste. “This war is not about what’s honourable. It’s about winning, or losing.”

“We have to win well. Properly. Otherwise…otherwise what’s the point?”

“What’s the point?” Alexander repeats, eyebrows flying up. “What’s the _point?_ The point is not dying.”  

It’s the first time either of them have mentioned death, beyond conceptual terms. John is surprised. He didn’t know life was so important to Alexander, rather assumed he had a death wish. It’s the only plausible explanation for enlisting in service of a country that doesn’t exist, for the book, for what they do together. At least, that’s how it’s always felt for Laurens.

But Alexander’s eyes are alight, blazing, his expression hard. He means what he says.

John is guilty for having misjudged him.

“But…” he swallows, tries again. “Aren’t you scared of…aren’t you worried what happens after?”

The irritation flickers again in Alexander’s jaw. He shoves the book under his arm, fixes John with a hard stare.

“There is no after,” he tells him before stalking the path out of the wood.

 

 Alexander does not stop. If anything, he starts.

He spends more time alone in his tent, stops coming out in the evenings. He has secured for himself a slick onyx basin, which he calls a scrying bowl, and takes to staring into its depths by the light of a single candle. John is not allowed to watch him when he does this. But when he comes stumbling into John’s tent after these long, starving sessions his eyes are glassy and there is a lost, frightened, otherworldly look about him. It scares John to let in this cold, wraithlike creature. But then Alexander creeps under the blanket and paws at John clingingly, wide-eyed with panic, and John shushes him, strokes his hair, whispers _darling_ into his neck. By the time they’re done, he looks more like himself.

In the daytime, the differences are still more noticeable. Things seem to go Alexander’s way, a lot more than they did before. Washington listens to him without condescension. Superior officers defer to his judgement. His clothes are newer, he amasses a substantive collection of _things:_ cufflinks, hair pomades, thick new cravats the colour of fresh cream. It hangs off a dwindling, spindly frame as he continues to lose weight. Fitful nights and not eating, he tells Laurens. Nothing more than that. Even so, as he glides like a spectre, restless and dissatisfied through the camp, John finds it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between him and the thing in the wood.

Alexander is not stupid. He senses John’s contempt every time a package comes with no return address containing stockings, or Washington allows him some coveted task. But what John doesn’t understand is it’s not about glory, or respect, and even less about wealth. Alexander cannot explain that to him – cannot impart the constant, paralysing fear that grips his heart in the dead of night, that keeps him up and has done since he was twelve years old. A shadowy spectre has followed him since his early years in St Croix, hovering over his pillow and trailing cold fingers along his cheek. He wakes up gasping, blood and head pounding as he tries desperately to draw air back into his lungs. He pushes himself to stay up later and later past midnight. He hates going to sleep.

John doesn’t get it. The one time they talk about it, he ends up truly offending Alexander.

“But it comes for everyone,” he reasons, staring perplexedly at Alexander sitting on the edge of the pallet with his head in his hands. “It’s not something to be afraid of. Death is on our side.”

“How d’you figure?” Alexander mutters, wiping a shaking hand over his clammy skin.  

“It’s the great equaliser,” John answers. “Rich or poor, black or white. Death is the only, truly fair and republican thing.”

Alexander baulks. He stares, scandalised at John as if he can’t believe what he’s just said.

“Fuck you,” he snaps. “That’s not true. God, you _would_ say that. Fucking rich boy, with your name and your slaves.”

He flings off the covers, pulls on his clothes. Marches out the tent with John staring distraught after him.

A few hours later he comes back. Settles in beside John and kisses his shoulder, whispering _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ John reaches for him and they fuck, again and again until Alexander is a sobbing wreck, the pillow sodden with his tears as he grasps frantically at John’s fingers, clutching them tight.

But John _doesn’t get it_ and it sucks because if not him, who else? Who else to unload the burden of this heavy, crushing thing that overwhelms Alexander every time he gazes across the water into a fading sunset, every time he comes, with an icy shudder, into John’s hand? How can it be that Alexander is the only one who appreciates the tragedy of it, the full, unsparing cruelty that you are here for a short time, and once that time is done that’s it. You’re wiped away like you never existed, as if nothing you ever did or felt counted for anything at all. A blot on tracing paper, smoothed into nothingness by an almighty hand that doesn’t even like you. His ambitions, his genius, even his friendships nothing but _a_ _walking shadow, a tale t_ _old by an idiot, full of sound and fury and_ _signifying nothing._ It’s enough to make anyone mad.

Of course, John doesn’t focus on that, hung up as he is on the necromancy thing.

“What do you see when you scry?” he asks Alexander.

They have a free afternoon and are stood outside the stables. Alexander is trying to re-animate a squirrel. The question throws off his concentration.

“You don’t want to know,” he tells John seriously.

“If it’s bothering you so much, why don’t you stop?”

“Gee, never thought of that,” Alexander rolls his eyes.  “Thanks, John. I think you single-handedly pulled me from the brink.”

He refocuses his efforts on the squirrel, trying a different hand movement. John watches him with intrigued disgust.

“You have to promise me,” John speaks after a while. “If I die, you won’t try to bring me back.”

“What does it matter to you?” Alexander returns. “You’ll be dead.”

“I’m serious,” John insists. “I don’t want you risking your soul for me. I’m not worth that.”

Alexander quits it with the squirrel, which looks only marginally less corpse-ish.

“I’ll decide what my soul is worth, thank you very much,” he says primly, wiping his hands on his breeches. “Whatever’s left of it, anyway.”

He’s joking. John wishes he wouldn’t. Alexander doesn’t believe in Hell. He’s not scared of death, he’s scared of dying. John is the opposite. Despite whatever atheist sympathies he professed in high school he still fears demons, hellfire, brimstone. I know Hell is real, he wants to say to Alexander. It’s been living inside of me since I was fourteen. He used to worry that the darkness would engulf him, spread like tar through his lungs until there wasn’t a space within him that wasn’t tainted by it. Now he’s sleeping with someone who, for all intents and purposes, has sold their body to Satan. Fear grips him sometimes after they’ve done it, and he looks at Alexander asleep in his arms. Wonders whether he isn’t some kind of succubus, and John has secured his fate just as surely as if he’d signed a blood pact. He thinks that Alexander, with his long nose and ginormous forehead, could very easily be the face that launched a thousand ships.

Alexander hears the unspoken thought and it makes him furious. Who does John think he is? Walking into forests with his bow and coming back an edgelord, speaking of Hell. You think you know anything about it? he wants to yell at him. You think you could handle seeing what I’ve seen? I’ve been there and back. I’ve crossed countless times and geographies, yelled into infinite voids. I stood on the Place de la Concord thigh deep in blood, watching a young man on the scaffold screaming for his wife, the blade coming down on his neck and his best friend watched without flinching. I crouched low in a trench while missiles thundered and witnessed the muddied faces of adolescents fall at the order to go over. I gazed into the fire of the Belgian Congo and saw the heart of darkness reflected back through the smoke. Don’t talk to me about Hell, John Laurens. It has everything to do with other people and nothing to do with you or me.

Months pass, then years. The war wages on. Alexander meets Elizabeth Schuyler. She manages to succeed where John had failed and Alexander gives up his conjuring. He hides the book in the library of their new home. He doesn’t burn it.

Laurens is captured by the British. They torture him. He doesn’t tell Hamilton.

 

Herein the problem with taking a lover in the army – sometimes they die. Alexander isn’t shocked when he receives the news. John has always been reckless, his curiosity ever continuing to get the better of him. Alexander admires him for taking the step he never could. He’s always said that he doesn’t fear death, he fears dying and that’s true. If he could push past it, take a step beyond and colonise that final frontier it would settle the argument between them. They could see who was right.

An irrelevancy – Alexander doesn’t have to charge headfirst into gunfire, or drink poison to see John again. The body isn’t accessible. Laurens lies in the dusty red earth of South Carolina, like his fathers before him. Alexander doesn’t have it in him to dig him up, couldn’t get out of New York even if he wanted to. His practice keeps him busy. He has a little one on the way.

The book lies far back, hidden behind a false shelf. Alexander blows off the dust, rubs his palm over the dry, cracked surface.

He lights a candle.

**Author's Note:**

> Please please let me know if you liked this, i wrote it on impulse fighting death and sleep when i really should be doing another essay and - rather like hamilton - i don't want it to have been for nothing.


End file.
